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External Storage of Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) in SharePoint Foundation

10/20/2016

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In this article

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

The Help topics in this section describe how to use the special external binary large object (BLOB) store provider (EBS Provider) interface, ISPExternalBinaryProvider, to allow you to store BLOB data in a data store that is external to the SharePoint content database. Topics in this section discuss the rationale for storing BLOB data externally, the architecture of the EBS Provider, and implemention of the EBS Provider in front-end Web applications for SharePoint Foundation.

Overview

Typically, as much as 80 percent of data for an enterprise-scale deployment of SharePoint Foundation consists of file-based data streams that are stored as BLOB data. These BLOB objects comprise data associated with SharePoint files. However, maintaining large quantities of BLOB data in a SQL Server database is a suboptimal use of SQL Server resources. You can achieve equal benefit at lower cost with equivalent efficiency by using an external data store to contain BLOB data.

Help topics in this section describe the programming interface and the implementation architecture that allows you to deploy a cost-effective external data store for BLOB data. Additionally, the discussion provides important technical information to support a trade-off analysis to determine the costs and benefits of accepting some degree of added complexity in exchange for lower operational costs.